Foreign Relations

Does Anybody Else Think Getting America Shopping Again is Crazy Talk?

dlindorff — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:48:05 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum
in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago,
and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about
how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the
Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their
incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping
again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout
so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and
that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some
relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of
whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get
Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

The problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services.

This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

First of all, we don’t need all this stuff. Is my life any better
if I go from a 18-inch TV screen to a 60-inch TV screen? Is it, for
that matter, any better if I go from an old cathode-ray tube to a flat
screen digital display, or from no TV to a TV?

Is my life any better if I buy a high-performance $50,000 BMW than
if I drive a $20,000 Honda Civic, or even a $5000 used Toyota Corolla
with extended warranty?

Is my life any better if I live with my wife and my teenage son in
a 4000-square-foot house than if I live in a 1800-square-foot or a
1200-square-foot house?

The answer is no. The benefits, if there are any at all, are minuscule, and usually short-lived.

The costs of these trying to satisfy these wants, however, are
enormous. When I buy the large flat screen TV, I am contributing to the
production of gases, used in the flat screen, that are hundreds of
times more potent greenhouse factors than carbon dioxide, and of
course, from a balance-of-trade perspective, I’m sending dollars
overseas to wherever the product is made (none are made in America). If
I buy the $50,000 BMW, I contribute to massive waste of resources in
building the vehicle and having it shipped from Germany, as well as
driving it, not to mention to balance-of-trade issue again. If I buy
the Honda, it may at least be made in America, but again there is all
the energy waste and pollution that goes into its construction. The
used car, on the other hand, gets good mileage and already exists. As
for the house, no family, except perhaps one that eschews family
planning and has a baby every year and a half, needs a 4000-square-foot
house, and any family with 12 kids that might occupy such a palace
would never be able to afford one.

So all this buying doesn’t make us happier. In fact, by saddling us
with massive amounts of debt, it simply enslaves us to jobs that polls
tell us most people are simply desperate to get away from. Why,
otherwise, do polls show that so many people want to retire early in an
era when life expectancies are extending, and when people are staying
healthy much longer into old age? Why, otherwise, do polls consistently
show that over 60 percent of Americans say they would like to have a
labor union represent them at work if they could get one? The reality
is that most jobs, where we spend the majority of our waking hours five
or six days a week, simply suck, and in many ways they suck because
people are so desperate to hang on to them so they can pay their bills
that they don’t dare speak up or, god forbid, sign a union card.

Secondly, these artificial wants which so dominate our daily lives
and that are instilled in us via slick marketing campaigns, are a
disaster for the environment and for the chances of human survival. The
earth is a finite resource, while humanity, growing at a prodigious
rate, is gobbling up those resources—water, oil, trees, the oceans, and
the very atmosphere itself--much faster than even the renewable
resources can replace themselves. This situation cannot go on, and yet
we’re told that the goal is to get us back on that rapacious and
self-destructive path as quickly as possible. Economic growth, we are
always told, is an unambiguous good and is the primary goal of economic
policy, though clearly it cannot go on.

Finally, thinking of ourselves as consumers, instead of as citizens
and as people, is destructive of our social nature. Instead of learning
to build community, and to relate to one another as neighbors and
fellow citizens and human beings, as mere “consumers,” we compete to
have more or better stuff, compete to get the best deals on the things
we buy, and compete to get jobs that will help us buy those things. The
one thing we do not do in a consumer-based model of society is
cooperate.

This is not condition we need to go back to.

Nor can we.

The consumer society as we have known it since the 1950s is dead,
at least here in America. We have bought so much that now the country
is a gigantic economic basket case. Our debts as individuals and
especially as a nation (of which we all own a piece), are
incomprehensibly great. According to a new report by Bloomberg, just
the debts that the government has promised to back up in the banking
and insurance industry in the current bailout have reached $7.5
trillion, which is half the nation’s annual gross domestic product for
the past year! The national public debt now totals $59.1 trillion,
which represents over half a million dollars for every man, woman and
child in America. External debt—the amount of money owed by the US to
foreign nations—was, before the bailout, $13.7 billion, or about the
total of a year’s economic activity in the US. Let’s be honest here:
There’s no way all, or even a significant portion, of this can ever be
repaid.

So what should we do? Well, for starters we need to start to
rethink what constitutes a good society. It’s clearly not a bunch of
crazed consumers, all struggling to pay their monthly bills, because
we’ve seen where that has gotten us. Far better would be a society that
valued education, the arts, scientific and philosophical inquiry, and
natural beauty. Instead of encouraging kids to go to business school or
law school, we should be encouraging them to go into the sciences, into
medicine, into the arts. Bailout funds should not be going to Citicorp
or AIG. They should be going to the hellholes that are called schools
in our decayed inner cities. They should be going into environmental
clean up projects and tree planting projects across the land. They
should be going into solar and wind energy programs, and geothermal
heating installation subsidies for every home in America.

Meanwhile, Americans should be waking up and recognizing how
consumerism has reduced us all to little more than serfs of the
corporations that sell us the things they convince us we need. Then we
should all sign up for unions, and start demanding that the Bill of
Rights be extended to the workplace. Why on earth should a boss be able
to fire someone for expressing an opinion that is constitutionally
protected outside the building? Why should a boss be able to tell me to
either do a dangerous job or quit? Why, for that matter, should the
boss be insulated from personal liability if I am injured at work
because of decisions that were made by management about working
conditions? These may seem to be remote issues from the matter of a
consumer-based economy, but they are not. It is because we are all
consumer-serfs that we have surrendered so much to our corporate
masters.

The very idea that someone as supposedly liberal as Robert Reich
could speak in terms of getting the consumer debt treadmill back up and
running as a goal shows how impoverished our politics has become.

A scant few months ago, people were finally waking up to the fact
that human life on this planet, indeed all life on this planet, is in
grave danger because of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere that is
being caused by human development and economic activity. Even then,
with clear evidence that the North Polar ice cap is vanishing, that the
oceans are acidifying and that species are dying off at an alarming
rate, there were those who grumbled at the cost when candidate Barack
Obama spoke of spending $15 billion over the next few years to combat
some of that warming by investing in clean energy program research and
development. Now, however, no one is talking about that sorely needed
investment, and meanwhile nobody bats an eye as the government, Obama
included, talks about blowing as much as a trillion dollars to get the
economy moving again!

There’s plenty of money to get people out to the mall, but no money
to save the earth, no money to save our children from ignorance, no
money for healthcare reform, no money for the arts.

And of course there’s war—two really. Since the US has ceased to be
a productive power in the world, and has become the world’s biggest
debtor nation, its sole claim to importance and power is now military,
and so there is not a word said, even as the country sinks into a
depression, of cutting the bloated and out-of-control $1-trillion
annual military and intelligence budget, perhaps 90 percent of which
serves no function but to frighten and oppress and kill mostly poor,
third world people around the globe. The propaganda machine tells us
that those poor saps in uniform dodging roadside bombs in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or dropping shells and bombs on villages made of mud
bricks and killing innocent women and children, are “defending our
freedom.”

Nonsense. They are destroying our freedom by helping to bankrupt this nation, while stirring up deep hatreds of America everywhere they set foot.

The good news is that this particular economic downturn in the US
may prove to be more than just another turn of the business cycle, but
rather, the beginning of the inexorable spiral of decline of the US as
a global economic power. The corporations (along with the schools,
churches and politicians) that have lured and tricked us all into this
mad consumer scramble for more and more useless crap and momentary
gratification have driven the country into a debt hole from which it
will clearly be impossible to climb out. That may not sound like good
news, but viewed from the perspective of the wider world it certainly
is—especially if it bankrupts the American military machine, and slows
the production of greenhouse gases. It could also be good news if it
leads us, the American people, to rethink what our lives are really all
about—if it leads us to start thinking of ourselves as part of a
society, again, instead of just that incredibly insulting and
derogatory term: “consumers.”

People recognized how inane and wrong it was when, immediately after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush told us it was important for Americans to pick themselves up and then go out and shop. But Robert Reich has it just as wrong. The challenge we face as a nation is not
to get people’s income growing and consumers back to buying stuff. It
is to get people to rethink what is important, to downsize our
appetites, to think as citizens of a community, and to focus our
politics and government on the important issues, like protecting the
environment and enhancing the quality of life not just for all
Americans, but for all the people who inhabit this globe.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

One-Sided Propaganda `Journalism' About a Destabilizing Boondoggle

dlindorff — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:51:44 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A CBS/Associated Press story
yesterday reported that the man who runs the Pentagon’s anti-missile
program, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, had warned incoming
President-elect Barack Obama that any reversal of Bush/Cheney
administration plans to install anti-ballistic missile missiles in
Poland would “severely hurt” American interests.

It was a classic “stupid” story of the type that we now expect to
get from our corporate media—basically a regurgitation of the statement
of one self-interested official, backed up by a few supporting quotes
from other government officials, and the usual “anonymous” official
sources, and lacking any context or opposing viewpoints.

Let’s analyze this a little more. The Bush/Administration, since
coming into office eight years ago, has been putting intense pressure
on Russia by pressing to have NATO expanded right up to Russia’s
borders—also to have NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, to Russia’s
south in central Asia. As one ratchet up in that pressure, the
administration pushed to get anti-missile sites placed in some
countries on Russia’s western border. One such proposed location was
the Czech Republic, but that was rejected because of local opposition.
Poland, however, agreed, after being pressed hard by the administration.

For US consumption, the move was presented as being aimed at Iran,
which Bush and Cheney keep insisting is constructing nuclear bombs. No
one could explain why anti-missile missiles placed in Poland, which
sits in northern Europe, would have any utility in knocking down would
be Iranian missiles aimed at Europe, or, for that matter, why Iran
would want to fire nuclear missiles at Europe, which, in Britain and
France, has a large and sophisticated nuclear stockpile capable of
incinerating Iran. The real target of those missiles became clear when
Georgia provoked Russia into sending its army into the breakaway state
of Ossetia. Before that little military conflict, Poland had been
resisting US pressure to agree to the missile sites, because of strong
local opposition. After Russia moved its troops and tanks into Ossetia,
and trounced Georgia’s military, Poland went ahead and approved the
anti-missile site.

If the anti-missile missiles were intended to protect against Iran,
such a decision by Poland would have made no sense whatever. Clearly
the US was pointing those things at a different enemy: Russia. And that
of course is how the Russians view things. Earlier this month, within
days of the US election, Russia’s president warned that if the
anti-missile battery were placed in Poland, Russia would move
short-range nuclear-capable missiles up to its border with Poland, thus
not only rendering the US missile “shield”, such as it is, useless
because there would be no notice of any attack from that close, but
also escalating the wholly unnecessary conflict between the US and NATO
on the one hand, and Russia on the other.

Of course, this is exactly what the Bush/Cheney plan has been all
along: to increase tensions with Russia, and thus justify continuation
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which should have been
dismantled along with the demise of the Soviet Union. The Bush/Cheney
strategy has been to use NATO as a kind of global cover for its
military adventures, such as Afghanistan, which is, it should be noted,
about as far from the “North Atlantic” as one can get.

None of this history made it into the CBS/AP story yesterday. Nor
was there any mention of the fact that the anti-missile missile program
itself is little more than a $160-billion boondoggle.

The only thing that would be “severely hurt” if the Polish basing
plan were killed by the incoming Obama administration would be Lt. Gen.
Obering’s career, the more so if Obama did the right and proper thing
and killed the whole “Star Wars” project altogether.

There are plenty of critics of this Reagan-era boondoggle. After
the spending of $160 billion on the program, not one missile has ever
actually been shot down if flight in a real test, where the trajectory
of the target wasn’t strictly plotted out in advance to guide the
interceptor. Moreover, as many scientific critics have repeatedly
pointed out, even low-tech Third World nations like North Korea could
include countermeasures such as decoy warheads, which would render any
effort at interception of a real warhead impossible. The entire idea of
an anti-missile shield against nuclear weapons is an incredibly
expensive fraud, yet one which promises to revive the threat of nuclear
war, because the simplest way to overcome an anti-missile system is to
increase the number of incoming missiles, and to put them as close to
the target countries as possible to reduce warning time.

Yet none of this kind of criticism of the Polish missile-basing plan was mentioned in the CBS/AP story.

It’s funny. If CBS or AP ran a story about a warning by the
chairman of General Motors saying that failure to give the company a
$25 billion bailout would “severely hurt” the US economy, without any
comment by critics of such a taxpayer gift, everyone would recognizing
the article as junk. But with national security stories, no one raises
an eyebrow when this kind of thing is done.

President Elect Barack Obama has a chance to do what President
Clinton should have done, which is to kill the whole “Star Wars”
program. He can start by killing the absurd and dangerous plan to put
anti-missile platforms in Poland.

If the media will report fairly and honestly about this issue,
instead of simply passing off the arguments of self-interested
proponents like anti-missile program director Lt. Gen. Obering, maybe
the American people will demand that it be ended, and that the billions
of dollars that have annually been wasted in pursuing this Pentagon
fantasy be put to better use, perhaps building schools or developing
electric cars to replace the gas guzzlers nobody wants to buy anymore.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Perfora Cariño, Perfora!

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:44:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s going to be interesting to see how much longer the vicious
decades-long US embargo of Cuba lasts, whichever person wins the White
House this November.

The main reason the US has stubbornly refused to trade with Cuba,
and has used sanctions to bully other nations into refusing to trade
with Cuba, while enthusiastically trading with and investing in China,
Vietnam and other communist regimes, is that Cuba has had little to
offer the US, either in terms of products or markets.

That’s all about to change dramatically, with word that the
Communist island just 90 miles to the south of Florida may possess oil
reserves equal to or greater than all the oil reserves left in the
United States.

According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian,
Cuba may be sitting on some 20 billion barrels of oil, located in Cuban
territory under the Gulf of Mexico. If the reports from Cuban, Spanish
and other geologists are correct, Cuba, which currently only produces
60,000 barrels of oil per day (about half the country’s domestic
demand), is on the verge of joining the ranks of the world’s exporting
nations.
20 billion barrels of reserves would place the little country in the top 20 nations in the world in terms of reserves.

The Republican crowds who are greeting presidential candidate John
McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin with rowdy chants of
“Drill Baby, Drill!” my have to start shouting “Perfora Cariño, Perfora!”
while watching Raul Castro joining meetings of OPEC.

After all, most experts say that a lot of the offshore drilling
being planned in US coastal waters is likely to lead to dry holes,
while drilling in Cuban waters by the country’s national oil company
Cubapetroleo, or Cupet, and by a consortium led by Spain’s Repsol,
which is set to begin with punching some test wells early next year,
are likely to produce gushers.

If the oil starts flowing, how long will it be before the US starts
clamoring to buy it? How long will it be, for that matter, before US
oil companies start using their lobbying clout to get the US embargo
lifted, so they can get a chance to join the drilling party? After all,
if the US companies are kept out by vestigial anti-Communist ideology,
the investment opportunities will be left wide open for European,
Middle Eastern and Venezuelan interests.

For the long-suffering Cuban people, who have been forced to eke
out a national economy virtually barred from the global marketplace,
this oil find is an astonishingly lucky break, particularly coming at a
time that existing oil reserves are beginning to run out, and that
prices for crude are soaring.

It’s going to be fun to watch the rationalizations coming out of
Washington, particularly from the hard Right, for whom Fidel Castro’s
Cuba has for several generations served as a prime bogeyman in the Cold
War pantheon of villains. Just as Corporate America has since the 1970s
been hypocritically singing the praises of Communist China, and has
been justifying economic trade and investment with that nation on the
grounds that “economic engagement” will bring democracy (all the while
calling for a boycott of all things Cuban), we will soon be hearing
such songs about virtues of economic engagement with Cuba.

This new oil bonanza may not be great news for the
environment—either the waters of the Gulf or for the carbon-sogged
atmosphere of the earth—but for the Cuban people, at least for the
short term, it’s an amazing turn of events.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush Exits with a Bang: Toxic Bailout and Two More Wars?

Heather Wokusch — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:53:09 -0400

The Bush administration is heading us towards more disaster with its 'toxic debt' bailout and destabilization of Pakistan and Iran. We can't afford to go down this road again. In this short video, Heather Wokusch provides background, context and ideas for taking action.

Links for sources cited in this video:

Bailout:

Crisis talks over $700B 'toxic debt' rescue plan

Bush: "The American people have got to know that I made this decision along with a lot of experts because it was necessary to protect them."

Pakistan:

Washington is Risking War with Pakistan

The American War Moves to Pakistan

Iran:

Preparing The Battlefield July 07, 2008

Dutch intel: US to strike Iran in coming weeks September 1, 08

Israel asks U.S. for arms, air corridor to attack Iran September 11, 08

U.S. to sell IAF smart bombs for heavily fortified targets September 14, 08

Bush could still attack Iran Sept 17 08

Russia Invades Latin America While Condi Talks Trash

Bob Fertik — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:55:03 -0400

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, John McCain, and the crazy Neocons have been playing "poke the giant" around Russia in places like Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

So Russia decided to retaliate by strengthening military and business relations in places like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Here's a good roundup from Bloomberg News:

Russia Builds Ties in Latin America to Challenge U.S.

By Henry Meyer

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Russia is in talks to build a space center in Cuba as it forges closer ties with Latin American countries opposed to the U.S. in the wake of Cold War-era tensions sparked by the Georgia conflict.

The head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roscosmos, Anatoly Perminov, who visited Havana with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin earlier this week, made the announcement in a statement posted today on the agency's Web Site.

After Cuba, Sechin traveled to Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez heads to Moscow next week, and Nicaragua. Russia is playing its most active role in the region since the Soviet era, in a challenge to the U.S. in its traditional backyard.

``We're increasing our presence in Latin America -- the countries in the region themselves want this,'' said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov. ``There's a big power in the north. They need a counterweight,'' he said by telephone from Moscow today, referring to the U.S.

Russia has sold billions of dollars of weapons to oil-rich Venezuela in recent years. Since the August war with U.S.-backed Georgia provoked a rift with the West, Russia has stepped up efforts to bolster its influence in Latin America.

``The worse Russia's ties with the West become, the more it will look for allies elsewhere,'' said Viktor Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA and Canada Institute in Moscow. ``Russia can play the role of a great power; it can sell oil, weapons and nuclear technology.''

Ties With Nicaragua

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, whose revolutionary Sandinista government was supported by military aid from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, said yesterday after talks with Sechin that he planned to strengthen ties with Russia. Sechin said Russia will study plans to fund energy projects and boost trade. Nicaragua was the only country to follow Russia in recognizing the independence of Georgia's two breakaway regions.

Bolivia, South America's poorest country, will turn to Russia to replace U.S. funding for its anti-drugs program, the Bolivian government said yesterday.

Bolivia will send representatives to Russia to wrap up an agreement to provide it with helicopters, logistical support and military training to help the fight against drug trafficking, La Razon reported today, citing Felipe Caceres, Bolivia's vice minister of social defense.

Strained Ties

Relations between the U.S. and Bolivia have soured in the past week after President Evo Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador for allegedly helping foment violence in the opposition stronghold of eastern Bolivia.

Russia's Foreign Ministry yesterday criticized what it termed efforts to undercut Bolivia's territorial integrity and ``all forms of outside interference in the affairs of this sovereign Latin American nation.''

Morales, Ortega and Chavez are close allies who oppose the historic U.S. influence in Latin America. By courting Russia, ``Latin American states can demonstrate to the U.S. that if it doesn't treat them with respect, they have other countries they can turn to,'' Kremenyuk said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will be in Peru in late November for the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group and plans a weeklong regional trip, his office said today.

Sechin's visit to Cuba followed one he made in July to the Cold War-era ally. Russian newspaper reports of plans to station nuclear bombers on the Caribbean island prompted warnings from the U.S. not to cross ``a red line'' and were later denied by Russia.

U.S. Missile System

Russia opposes proposed U.S. missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Communist-era satellites. It's also resisting further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, accusing the U.S. of threatening its security by moving militarily up to Russia's borders.

Chavez last week welcomed two Russian TU 160 bombers, which flew from Venezuela to conduct training flights over neutral waters. Venezuela is planning a joint naval exercise in the Caribbean later this year with Russian warships, including the atomic-powered Peter the Great cruiser.

The Venezuelan leader will be in Moscow for the second time in two months next week. Three Russian oil companies signed exploration deals for Venezuela during Chavez's last visit to Russia in July.

Russia is currently in talks to sell air defense systems, armored personnel carriers and new-generation Su-35 fighter jets to Venezuela, the Kommersant newspaper reported, citing state industrial holding company Russian Technologies chief Sergei Chemezov.

So how is our Russia expert-in-chief responding? With typical Bushevik denial and trash talk.

Rice says West must resist Russian "bullying"

Reuters/Susan Cornwell
Thu Sep 18, 6:17 PM ET

The West must stand up to "bullying" by Moscow, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian and aggressive, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a speech highly critical of Russia on Thursday.

In her first major address on Russia since its incursion into Georgia last month, Rice said Moscow had taken a "dark turn" that left its global standing worse than at any time since 1991, when it emerged from the fall of the Soviet Union.

Rice, a former Soviet expert who has presided over a steady deterioration of relations with Russia, said Moscow's invasion of Georgia was part of a pattern that included its use of oil and natural gas as a political weapon, the suspension of a treaty on conventional forces in Europe and a threat to target peaceful nations with nuclear weapons.

"The picture emerging from this pattern of behavior is that of a Russia increasingly authoritarian at home and aggressive abroad," Rice said in the speech to the German Marshall Fund.

The United States and Europe must not allow Russian actions in Georgia to achieve any benefit, she said. "Not in Georgia. Not anywhere," she said.

"Our strategic goal now is to make it clear to Russia's leaders that their choices are putting Russia on a one-way path to self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance."

Umm Condi, Russia isn't facing isolation, it's expanding throughout Latin America!

Moscow was internationally condemned for sending troops to Georgia to stop Tbilisi's attempt to reassert control over the pro-Russian, separatist region of South Ossetia.

Moscow later recognized South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia, as independent states, and on Wednesday signed treaties to protect them from Georgian attack.

The Kremlin said it had a moral duty to defend the regions against what it called "genocide" by Georgia's military.

But some political analysts have said Russia's actions heighten the risk of Moscow attempting to exert more influence over other former Soviet territories, particularly Ukraine.

'SPHERE OF INFLUENCE'

Rice rejected a Russian "sphere of influence" over its neighbors and hoped Russia leaders would "overcome their nostalgia for another time."

Umm Condi, you've squandered the American "sphere of influence" over Latin America, which dates back to another time - the presidency of James Monroe.

"We cannot afford to validate the prejudices that some Russian leaders seem to have: that if you pressure free nations enough -- if you bully, and threaten, and lash out -- we will cave in, and forget, and eventually concede," Rice said.

"The United States and Europe must stand up to this kind of behavior, and all who champion it."

She also scoffed at Moscow's recent dispatch of "Blackjack" bombers to U.S. foe Venezuela.

Rice said Russia's behavior threatened its participation in a number of global diplomatic, economic and security bodies, including the Group of Eight industrialized nations, and jeopardized Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

But she said Washington would continue to pursue areas of common concern with Russia, from denuclearizing the Korean peninsula to stopping Iran's rulers from acquiring nuclear weapons and combating terrorism, underscoring Washington's need for Moscow to play a role in international negotiations.

Rice, who called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to tell him she was giving the speech, said the door remained open for Georgia and Ukraine to eventually join the NATO alliance.

But some European governments have misgivings about allowing those states to take the first step toward joining NATO, and successfully blocked the move earlier this year.

In London, Pentagon chief Robert Gates used a less critical tone when asked whether NATO should change its operational posture toward Russia as a result of events in Georgia.

"I think we need to proceed with some caution because there clearly is a range of views in the alliance about how to respond, from some of our friends in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, to some of the countries in western Europe," Gates said.

One U.S. analyst said he did not see the point of Rice's speech. "It didn't lay out a framework that showed American leadership for where do we go from here," said Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO now with the RAND corporation.

Nope, it was just trash talk - the only thing the Busheviks are good at.

Heckuva job, Condi!

Experience is Over-Rated

dlindorff — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:25:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin stated again, most recently in her interview yesterday
by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, that she has foreign policy experience because
as governor of Alaska she has been in charge of that state’s National
Guard, and because Alaska is, doggone it, “right next” to Russia.

This made me feel pretty good, because it made me realize that I
have a whole lot of skills and experience which I hadn’t really
appreciated before and that I could perhaps use to get myself out of
this freelance journalism profession, which is not all that great from
a financial perspective.

I, for instance, live very close to the garage where my mechanic
works (I mean, I drive past the place every day and even buy my gas
there), so I’m ready to be a car mechanic (I can’t tell you how many
cars I’ve seen being gone over there, and have even sometimes watched a
bit as my own vehicles were up on the lift). I also live literally
across the street from a large forest, which qualifies me to be a
number of things—forest ranger, lumberjack, and perhaps naturalist.

I’ve also been to the doctor many times, so maybe I should hang a
shingle and open up a medical practice. I swear I’ve got all those exam
questions by memory at this point, and they’ve got nurses to do the
stuff with the arm cuff and the stethoscope.

Of course, the real money these days is in law, and there I’ve really got it nailed. Not only do several lawyers live right in my neighborhood,
but I’ve actually been in court and seen lawyers at work. For that
matter, I even had a lawyer argue a case for me once, when I was being
charged with trespassing at the Pentagon. He wasn’t successful at
getting my fine and jail time dropped, but hey, you learn from other
people’s failures, too. Furthermore, I actually wrote a book with a co-author who is a lawyer. With all that experience, I could certainly be an attorney.

Over the years, I’ve spent time at the seashore, and even went on a
one-week ocean sailing trip, so you’d have to admit oceanography is
almost in my blood. Or perhaps I could be a sea captain. I’m sure I
could do at least as well as the captain of the Exxon Valdez tanker.

Come to think of it, back when I was 16, I hitchhiked up to Alaska
with a friend and spent the summer thumbing around the state, so I know
that place like the back of my hand, which means if Sarah Palin gets
elected and goes to Washington, maybe I could be governor of Alaska.
And then, as governor I’d be commander of a National Guard unit, so I’d
be qualified to be a vice president, or, should the opportunity present
itself, even president of the United States. Actually, I’d be maybe
more experienced than Palin for the job, because I grew up in
Connecticut, and thanks to the small size of the states in my native
New England, have actually been living closer to a foreign
country—Canada—than she, living in Wasilla, has been living to Russia.
In other words, when you think of it, my foreign policy experience is
much greater than hers. Besides, I’ve actually visited Canada a few times, which really boosts my experience in international affairs.

I know some people think that jumping into jobs like president or
vice president of the United States based upon what they might perceive
as limited experience is presumptuous, but that’s because they aren’t
being fair and open-minded. And I’ll admit that it’s hard, with
relatively limited experience, to expect someone like Palin or me to
measure up to the standard of someone like our current vice president,
Dick Cheney, who came to his position after having served previously as
presidential chief of staff, as secretary of defense, and as a member
of Congress. I mean, that’s real experience, and it shows in the fine
job he’s done as VP.

But we shouldn’t let examples like Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld,
another guy who took an important government post—in his case Secretary
of Defense—after having considerable prior experience—make us obsess
about experience. I mean, look at our current president. George W. Bush
got elected in 2000, when his experience consisted of just two terms as
governor of Texas, a state where the governor has a largely ceremonial
role and most of the real work of government is handled by the
legislature, and look what a great job he did in the White House!
Furthermore, his only military experience was as a pilot in a Texas
National Guard unit, most of which tour of duty he missed because he
decided to work on his father’s failed election campaign instead, and
because he didn’t want to take any drug tests, and look what a fine job
he’s done as commander in chief.

This should all make Americans lighten up and be less snooty and
judgemental about what they demand in terms of experience in
presidential and vice presidential candidates. Palin in my view has proved her qualifications for the job. Yesterday she sent her young son off to battle in Iraq to fight against "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans" on 9-11 seven years ago. What better evidence do we need of this woman's solid grasp of foreign affairs, history and combat?

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Foreign Policy and National Security Are Not the Same Thing

dlindorff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:27:10 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms “National Security” and “Foreign Policy” by both Republicans and Democrats.

Granted that the history of US foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America’s instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as “national security” issues.

In Bush-speak, national security come to mean having big guns, lots of heavily armed troops, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, naval armadas and a bully’s willingness to use these weapons on a whim, with no thought of consequences.

The term is kind of oxymoronic, since it is clear that by resorting to war and to threats of war, and by squandering unprecedented sums of money on the military, eight years of bellicosity has not made the nation more secure. Quite the opposite: The military has been run into the ground, the economy has been bankrupted, education, healthcare and other critical national services have been shortchanged, and the country has become a pariah state, viewed around the world as a loose cannon and a terror nation—hardly a comforting position to be in.

Foreign policy, meanwhile, has ceased to have any meaning at all, beyond the making of war or threats of war, making it virtually synonymous with the term national security.

When I was a Fulbright professor in China, back in 1991, at a mid-year conference in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, we grantees were addressed by the head of the Fulbright Program in China, a cultural affairs director from the US embassy in Beijing. He informed us that as teachers (I was teaching journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai), we Fulbrighters were the frontline of American foreign policy in China. Most of us were kind of repulsed by his semi-military allusion to a battle line and by implication to us as soldiers, and we chose instead to see our role as something different: emissaries from the American people to the Chinese people. In fact, given that most of the 21 of us were hardly superpatriots or cold warriors (the academics, journalists, lawyers and other professionals who serve in the Fulbright Program tend demographically to be among the most liberal and left-leaning group in the American workforce), we would have made a pretty bad defense line. Rather, what we were doing in China, by teaching and building relationships with young Chinese college students, was the essence of real foreign policy—building bridges at the grass roots level between the people of China and the people of the US.

Foreign policy can be reduced to a strategic chess game—the kind of “real politik” practiced by Klemens von Metternich in the 19th Century, or espoused by Henry Kissinger in the Nixon years—but it is actually, or at least ought to be, much broader than that kind of cold and calculating manipulation and pursuit of narrow self-interest.

Real foreign policy should be about winning friends, building trust, establishing relationships between countries and peoples, negotiating treaties designed to achieve mutual advantage and to deter aggression. It is about aiding countries that are in need of assistance, and at its best, should also be about making the world a safer, better place for all, which in the end is the best way to guard against war and the threats of war.

Now it would be naïve to imagine a foreign policy that ignored national self-interest. Much as I or others might wish for a world without borders and a common humanity, in a world of nation states, it is inevitable that foreign policy as practiced by any nation, including the United States, will be focused on achieving the maximum benefit for that nation, and US foreign policy has always been about just that, and unfortunately probably always will be. But even granted this selfish parochialism, it is incredibly shortsighted and ignorant to treat foreign policy as simply an America-first process of bullying others into submission to our dictates. Thousands of American teachers and Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers do much more to advance America’s position in the world and to enhance the nation’s security than do hundreds of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs and missiles.

For Republicans, there is no difference between national security, which is defined as a powerful and assertive military, and foreign policy. But Democrats, who at times have had a more nuanced view, have more recently bought into this too. At the current Democratic Convention, anxious to look as tough as Republicans, Democratic speakers have used the terms national security and foreign policy interchangeably.

Afghanistan and Iraq provide excellent cases in point. Clearly, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ostensibly aimed initially at hunting down Al Qaeda fighters and leaders, quickly devolved into an all-out assault on that nation, which has been reduced to the same rubble and state of chaos and civil war as has Iraq. Now, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is talking about expanding the war there, and increasing the killing and destruction in that country. In Iraq, where the US has been involved in an orgy of killing and destruction now for over five years, Obama and fellow Democrats are calling for a “responsible exit” from that conflict over the course of another 16 months. A truly responsible exit would be an immediate withdrawal, a national apology to Iraqis and to the world community, and a massive program of reparations to help rebuild that nation.

What Obama and the Democrats are touting is not foreign policy. It is a continuation of national security run amok.

No amount of American force, no level of mayhem and slaughter, will bring about a secure and tranquil Afghanistan. In fact, every time Americans kill Afghanis, as American bombers recently did, slaughtering 60 children and 30 other adults, women and men, in an aerial bombardment reminiscent of the German Luftwaffe’s attack on the Basque village of Guernica, they produce not peace and submission, but rather hatred and a desire for vengeance.

It will take perhaps a generation of good works for the US to undo the evil done to American foreign relations by eight years of Bush/Cheney obsession with national security, but it doesn’t even look like the Democrats “get it.” In Congress, they have vied with Republicans to look tough, supporting both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, they have supported the continued funding of those wars and increased funding for the already bloated US war machine, and they are now backing Obama’s call for more combat troops in Afghanistan.

Real foreign policy would be looking at ways to work with other nations to bring down the level of combat, and to bring peace to Afghanistan and to other war-torn regions of the world.

Meanwhile, the concept of national security needs to be broadened. As Genghis Khan, conqueror of China, is reputed to have said as a frightened Chinese empire, at extraordinary financial and human cost, constructed the Great Wall to fend him off, “A wall is only as strong as the people behind it.”

One need only drive through any American city today and view the bombed-out neighborhoods, the crack dens, the pot-holed streets, the decrepit transit systems, the shamefully overcrowded and prison-like schools where any teaching and learning that goes on is an accident, one need only visit ignored and forgotten rural areas of America where unemployment is the norm and healthcare is half a day’s drive and half a year’s income away, one need only drive through a suburban neighborhood and look at all the “For Sale” and even more pathetic “For Sale: Reduced Price!” signs in front of houses, to see that what lies behind America’s walls, like the ridiculous one being built now along parts of the border with Mexico, is incredible weakness. (At the rate things are going here, it won’t be long before Americans will be scaling that wall to find jobs in Mexico!)

The folly of conflating national security and foreign policy, and of imagining that a mindless willingness to resort to force and bullying is the sine qua non for being “presidential,” has been made painfully clear not only in the screams of wounded children in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the cries of hungry children in America. The United States does not need a man of war in the White House. It needs a wise advocate of peace.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Huffing and Puffing at the Pentagon

dlindorff — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:02:26 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

American Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one. “Clearly, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."

Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the US, where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.

But Gates doesn’t speak with such clarity and directness in other matters. "I think that there is a real concern that Russia has turned the corner here and is headed back toward its past rather than toward its future, and my hope is that we will see actions in the weeks and months to come that provide us some reassurance," he said, speaking on ABC and CNN, claiming that the country was returning to the authoritarianism of the old Soviet era.

Ahem.

It might also be noted that the US is heading increasingly towards an authoritarian future, no? Certainly over the course of the last seven years we have seen the executive branch in the US claim that it no longer needs to enact or adhere to laws passed by Congress or to terms of international treaties approved by the Senate. We have also seen this administration refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas for information and testimony from White House officials, effectively establishing the presidency as a dictatorship, have we not?

As for Gates’ condemnation of Russia for resorting to force in Georgia, one need not defend Russia’s actions there to note that such tactics have long been deemed fully appropriate in the US. Only recently America used force to depose an elected government in Haiti, hustling its elected president off into exile. The US has also been working assiduously through covert means to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, even supporting (and probably helping to organize) a temporarily successful military coup there. Then of course there is the decades-long effort by the US to overthrow the government of Cuba, which has included everything from invasions and embargos to multiple assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Russia is clearly moving in an authoritarian direction at home, and is reasserting its influence and control over some—though hardly all—of the states that were formerly part of the USSR. But in all of this it is merely aping the behavior of the US government, which is becoming more authoritarian also, and which has always been a bully in its local neighborhood.

If Gates has anything legitimate to complain about it is that the American military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its preoccupation with drumming up conflict with Iran, have rendered the Pentagon almost impotent when it comes to threatening Russia.

All that is left for Gates to do is huff and puff about Russia backsliding to the bad old days when it was able to stand up to the US as an equal.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We're a Nation of Lemmings

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:27:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day,
and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost
all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some
kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse
about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60
percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and
how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all
the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property
development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the
release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most
radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants,
factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports
that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions
of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and
release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen
clathrates for millennia—the release of which would cause global
temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane
is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of
Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost
line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on
important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the
latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been
very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in
progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with
exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that
said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed
enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s
climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as
usual—they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the
lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative
and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government
funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy
solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are
clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when
gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No
such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get
any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that
massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely
sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s
what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce
carbon emissions—as individuals and as a nation. Turning off
air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by
central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day
if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the
upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to
occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most
Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much
room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and
cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in
unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d
go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the
day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for
long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of
on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have
yet to see, on my own bike rides in town or when driving anywhere,
someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand—carrying a load in
a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed
like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter
with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically
virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is
dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery
and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action—and I don’t
just mean individual life changes, but political action—to try and save
their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in
order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially
when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason
nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their
collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation,
as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think
about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai,
China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had
been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not
just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town
that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a
dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand,
with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep
the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off
the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the
project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their
shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many
people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very
friendly—just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We
began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who
had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt.
They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring
their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable,
which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous
one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The
winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant
running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant
would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then
he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these
thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the
collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the
insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We
need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to
fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction
of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist
policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war
to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean
communities starting to organize around improving mass transit,
arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our
political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Moroccan congress in usa

mimichami — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:04:55 -0400

Arab American Dems Rally For Obama3 07 2008

On Saturday Night, June 28th, the Moroccan Congress of USA held their “Unite Tonight” for Obama event at Shiraz Grill in Orlando. The event was spearheaded by Jamila “Mimi” Chami, who is the director of the Moroccan Congress in Florida.

There was great Iranian food, live music, and of course, sheesha. The Moroccan Congress event at Shiraz was a great time to talk to the community about their political interests and get them to sign the National Declaration.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Moroccan Congress, click here to visit their website. Or, send me an e-mail and I’ll get you hooked up with the right people (after recruiting you as a volunteer of course :)).

And, for those of you who are SO sad that you missed this event, don’t worry… I’ll be having a meet and greet event on July 19th. Details to come soon! Yalla VOTE!!

P.S…. Let’s hear from the REPUBLICAN side of the aisle soon, ok? If you’re a Republican organizing in Florida, I’d love to hear from you and help you get out the vote!